1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to portable information gathering equipment such as a pen computer, and more particularly to a portable information gathering apparatus which enables efficient input of information such as spoken statements, images, and characters, and an information gathering method performed by such apparatus.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, pen computers and other similar devices have come into widespread use as portable information gathering equipment. There are being developed pen computers which are not only provided with functions for recording information written on a tablet screen with an input pen, but also pen computers provided with a function for capturing images and spoken statements also. There are increasing tendencies to enhance the multifunctional features of such pen computers for greater convenience.
FIG. 9 is a schematic block-diagram showing conventional portable information gathering equipment constructed to perform the function of recording information written on a tablet screen with an input pen and also the function of capturing images and voice inputs. This portable information gathering equipment is constituted primarily by a CPU 1, a ROM 2 in which processing programs and the like are stored, a data memory 3, a tablet 6 which combines a digitizer 4 and an LCD 5 into one piece, an image input device 7, a voice input device 8, a voice output device 9, an information gathering menu selector 10, and a system bus 11 for connecting these components to the CPU 1.
Judging from the illustrated configuration, this type of conventional portable information gathering equipment is designed to capture image and voice information in addition to the pen input information which is known as "ink information" captured through the tablet 6.
In the conventional portable information gathering equipment, however, whenever entering information, a menu selection has to be performed through the information gathering menu selector 11 to properly set the mode in accordance with the type of information to be captured before entering the information. For instance, to enter an image and then characters, the mode must be set first for image input to capture an image, then the mode must changed to character input to take in characters.
For the portable information gathering equipment to be user-friendly, all the different types of captured information, namely, the image information, the voice information, and the ink information, should be handled as a collection on a page basis (hereinafter referred to as "page data"). For example, to record the information about a certain product in terms of one-page information, it would be convenient to enter the image of the product and add the description of the image in terms of voice information or ink information entered using a pen, thus handling all the image, voice, and ink information as a piece of page data, that is, handling them in units of pages.
More specifically, it is desirable that multimedia information, including image information, voice information, and ink information, captured by a user arbitrarily be stored automatically in a storing means as page data, i.e. a single piece of collective data on a page basis without the need for operation by the user so that the user is not even aware of the processing.
This type of conventional portable information gathering equipment, however, has not been designed to automatically handle all of the image information, voice information, and ink information as page data for each page without the need for the performance of operations by the user of the equipment.
Thus, the conventional portable information gathering equipment requires that the mode be set for each type of information to be captured before starting the capture of the information matched to the mode. Further, the conventional equipment is not capable of handling captured image information, voice information, and ink information as a collection of page data for each page without the need operations by the user, thus leaving room for improvement in the aspect of ease of use.